For a long time, feeling the sad elixir of my father’s voice slide through my body as he talked about what should have been was both awful and strangely curative---the remedy for everything wrong with me. Before long, though, I felt myself disappearing whenever he spoke, sinking under the weight of his grief like a rowboat taking on water.

You’re not alone, he’d tell me, and this was the beginning, the start of every lesson of my apprenticeship. I was being tutored in grief and its responsibilities, learning to be a survivor. (To live through tragedy is not enough, he taught me; to live is to be indentured, forever, to a particular standard of behavior.) I know, I’d say, shifting about in the bed as he searched my face with an urgency, watching to make sure I meant it, that I’d absorbed his reassurance. (Hungry eyes, I read later in some terrible romance novel, He had hungry eyes, and I knew exactly what it meant.) I was lying, always. I did not know. I understood what he meant, but I wasn’t comforted; you’re not alone was both a confirmation of what I already knew---there is no one who can share this grief, not this way---and something of a threat: you are not entirely yourself. You will never be only yourself.

You are not alone, he'd say, tapping my sternum with one index finger. Brian is right here. Some nights I was sure I felt him in my chest: tiny nesting doll of a boy passed to me for safekeeping, the thimble of him spilling over with stories and prayers and regret, set in the hollow place my father thought Brian’s death had carved inside me. Sometimes it was my shoulder he touched. Sometimes he made a vague motion around my head, as though Brian was a halo, as though his death had made me queen of something. Will you remember him? he asked. Do you promise?, or What do you think he's doing now? Do you think he's learning to play basketball? Do you think he knows how to read? Do you think he misses us?

I never knew what to say. I couldn’t, no matter how I tried, imagine him. Impossible, to fantasize a personality, a childhood, a face---to extrapolate from his short life in the easy way my father did. Was I the world’s worst twin? Immune to the connection which surely existed between other twins, which transcended even death? I should know him, I thought. Something was wrong with me, that I didn’t know him. Something was terribly wrong: I didn’t want to know him. I had no need, just then, for an imaginary comrade, a lavish and consoling fiction. That would come later.

1929 / 30000 (6.43%)

The father of my memory, of my very youngest childhood, wears his gray weekday suit perpetually, like a fog. I am three, and four, and five. Is he depressed? Every evening he slumps in a chair and unknots his tie so when I tug on the end it will slither free of his collar, a glamorous, musk-smelling heap that I stroke and adore. The pleasure I get from doing this seems to please him a little but he’s not really paying attention to me: he’s studying his hands, flexing the fingers over and over again and gazing at them with an air of detachment, as though they don’t belong to him. Does he think that by studying their motion he might discover how exactly he got here, how he became a man whose son is dead? (I honestly don’t know. It’s a gesture he still makes frequently, one that helps me connect the father of my present to the one I write about now, and though it’s always seemed to convey a sense of helplessness I am aware that saying so means I editorialize. It’s unfair but true: what I remember and what I imagine are a blur.)

Sometimes I catch him staring at me with a sort of haunted tenderness---as though the fact of me is precious but unbelievable---that makes me feel vague and permeable and slightly loony, like I’m something he’s hallucinated. It is clear, in these moments, that my face causes him pain. Does it remind him of the boy he lost? Can he be in mourning, still? Brian has been dead for several years but I imagine the loss, and the relative freshness of my father’s grief, confounds him. He can’t reconcile the pain and the distance of its source and is stranded in some place between, apart from me, from his family. A better writer than I once described this experience as “the bewilderment,” as though it’s an actual place, a jungle which thickens around the bereaved over many years, isolating and obscuring them. This feels right to me, to my adult self. It helps explain why I could never know him.

Or never quite know him, that is. Though during the day my father had trouble looking me straight in the eye, at night the distance between us disappeared. Darkness made confidences permissible, and once free to confide he couldn’t help it: at bedtime he elegized Brian compulsively, inventing and revising the lost son every night as he tucked me into bed, casting him as the hero of every bedtime story and relating each elaborate, sentimental tale with sorry relish, eager for us to share a grief---for me to understand exactly who had been taken from us.

It was, of course, impossible. I understood nothing. These exchanges (for some reason I can’t help but think of them as having been collaborative) were evangelical, beseeching. To explain even the simplest thing, to introduce facts---like who Brian was, exactly---would have ruined them. He never did explain, not precisely, and I was never sure: my father said, sometimes, that Brian was a baby, but we had one of those in my brother Scott and he was boring, so Brian could only have been a grown man---a valiant, omnipotent, extraordinary man. A celebrity. Did my father know that every time he said Brian’s name I pictured Superman and Santa Claus and Martin Luther King rolled into one? I imagine now that’s what he saw Brian too---as larger than life, larger than any of the rest of us.

1472 / 30000 (4.91%)

In the United States, between 1979 and 1983, 19,187 premature babies---my twin brother Brian among them---died from what was then called hyaline membrane disease, a condition caused by a lack of surfactant in the lungs.

At the time, HMD (now known as respiratory distress syndrome, or RDS) was extremely common: the leading cause of death for infants born, as Brian and I were, before 31 weeks gestation. Still, until I ordered Brian's death certificate from the state two years ago, I'd never heard of it, had never known how---or even precisely when---he died. (It was only then, in the summer of 2008, that I learned he died at four days old, not five.)

I learned, researching, that---to put it simply (and unscientifically)---surfactant is the grease in the machine. Breathing is hard work and surfactant, which is created during the last several weeks of pregnancy, makes that work easier. If a baby is born too early, before enough surfactant is produced, the lungs' wheezy, inadequate bellows are apt to malfunction, leaving the blood without oxygen.

I found that underneath the medicalese of the diagnostic criteria there's the grimmest kind of melodrama: a baby has to try and fail to take a breath. She has to struggle for it, to grunt and pant, to turn nearly purple with the effort of breathing. I learned that the treatment for it is as fatal as the syndrome itself: not breathing is awful; having a machine breathe for you is awful and more: both can lead to hemorrhage, seizures, sepsis, organ failure, brain death.

Though the syndrome is less common now, and much less likely to be fatal---mothers at risk for pre-term delivery are routinely given corticosteroids, which speed an infant's lung development and increase the production of surfactant---it is not rare: according to the Centers for Disease Control, 16,000 babies a year are diagnosed with RDS. More than 700 of them die.

I used to perceive statistics as a kind of wall: unyielding, impenetrable, offering little. Now I find that they're a sort of window: behind those numbers (700 lives ended every year) is this question: how many families are like mine?

  Word Count:

875 / 30000

In my whole childhood I only ever found one photo of Brian: in the mouldering, musty Polaroid I dug out of the basement without my parents' knowledge, he is sprawled alone in his Isolette in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Children's Hospital in Boston, surrounded by a nest of gauze and wires. A respirator mask obscures everything but his chin; his waxy skin shines like that of a supermarket apple. Though I don't know exactly when it was taken, or by whom, it's safe to assume that my infant self is somewhere just outside the frame, in her own Plexiglas chamber, her matching respirator chuffing away mechanically, making her breathe.

When I found the photo (when, in truth, I went looking for it) I was 7. For a long time afterward I kept it in my jewelry box with other, childish treasures, under the guardianship of its tiny, spring-loaded ballerina; then, later, I kept it between pages 16 and 17 of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, in the middle of "A Step Away From Them." I carried that book and its broken question with me all the time (But is the / Earth as full, as life was full, / of them?) the way I assume some people carry religious medals, as an amulet and talisman, a testament to the possibility that I was not alone.

My parents probably hid the photo, I realize now, for precisely this reason: so none of us would be tempted to fetishize it, to make it a relic. And I understand that (probably, if I had been them, I would have made the same decision), but my longing and determination---what the writer Jane Alison calls an "occult craving" for evidence of Brian---was such that I think a fetish was inevitable. In retrospect, I think it probably couldn't be helped.

Word Count:

517 / 30000

For the longest time, I couldn't use the word twin. Not because it doesn't apply to us---Brian and I were in fact born five minutes apart---but because it's freighted with so much significance, with a romance bordering on mysticism. We talk, in our culture, of the special connection, the irrevocable, unimpeachable bond twins are supposed to have, and it's always felt wrong, because he died when we were four days old, to claim him that way. Even brother, though it's correct, feels too intimate: to put Brian in the same category as my younger, living siblings, with whom I share so much, seems unfair.

There's no one term for what he is to me: he's myth and rumor, ghost and figment, rival, mirror. Privately, until about a year ago, I called him my womb-mate, which (although it's both entirely accurate and appealingly casual, a little acid to dilute my longing---someone important is missing, it says, not that I care) feels silly to me now, its nonchalance too vehement. I never said it aloud to anyone, but still.

A year from today, I will be thirty. I am too old, now, not to deal honestly with him. They're only six words: "my twin brother Brian, who died." They shouldn't be so hard to say, but they are.

Word Count:

212 / 30000